So there are some comics coming out this week.
- Adventure Comics #1 – DC’s new title starring the newly revived Superboy, and co-starring the Legion of Superheroes, giving that particular property yet another try in the hopes that it’ll stick. I do love the Legion, but I’m getting pretty tired of reboots/revamps. Also, the “retailer incentive variant cover” is apparently going to be Adventure Comics #504, which is a mean trick to pull on someone who may have a pretty good run of issues near the end of the previous incarnation of Adventure, up to issue #503.
Rats. I’ve been trying not to pick up the variants, but I think I may have to go for this one.
- Big Questions #12 – This is a neat little comic…you can see a brief sample of it here.
- Blackest Night #2 and Blackest Night: Batman #1 – This event has been a huge hit at the store, and even the tie-in series Tales of the Corps has been selling through on multiple reorders for us. We ordered strong on the Batman tie-in, so hopefully that’ll continue the sales trend.
- Booster Gold #23 – Unlike other comics that have bumped up to the $3.99 price point and took a bit of a hit in sales (like, oh, say, the Avengers books), Booster Gold sales actually went up. Okay, not by a lot, but still it took us a bit by surprise. I guess that Blue Beetle back-up did the trick.
- Cable #17 70th Frame Liefeld Variant – Okay, first….it’s Rob Liefeld drawing mutant comic stuff. It’ll sell. Second, didn’t we have Marvel’s 25th anniversary at some point in the ’80s? Just more of that creative number juggling that results in #1 issues from Marvel suddenly becoming numbered in their hundreds.
- Captain America Theatre of War: To Soldier On – This reminded me of something that occurred to me recently: when Superman “died” in that big hoohar in the early ’90s, he was pretty much gone from comics for a period of months. He wasn’t in any specials or one-shots, he wasn’t guest-starring in other books, he wasn’t in any out-of-contuity stories…or if he was, he was in very darn few of them. At any rate, the end result was that it felt like, for the reader, that the character was actually, honestly gone. Okay, you knew he was coming back eventually, but it was still kinda weird to know that Superman just plain wasn’t around for the time being.
Now with Bruce Wayne and, to a lesser extent, Captain America, we didn’t get that. The Wayne Batman is still appearing in one-shots and Confidential, Cap was still getting one-shots, and an alternate version of him was popping up in Ultimates. And then there was that Captain America: White thing, which had one issue, with more perhaps theoretically coming, someday. In other words, the characters may supposedly be dead ‘n’ gone, but you never get a chance to miss them because they never go away. Lessens the impact a bit, I think.
- Grimjack: Manx Cat #1 – Just the other day I was talking about Grimjack over on Alan’s site about Nexus and the failure of its most recent series in the direct market. Alan puts the burden of the blame on retailers, and I’m not saying he’s entirely wrong…I heard from enough people who had no idea a new Nexus series was out, and never saw it in their local shops. But my counterpoint was that the fault was in Nexus itself…you can read my specific reasons over in my comment on Alan’s post, but it can be summed up as “too hard to get into, for new and old readers alike.” (A year between issues didn’t help, either.)
My example of a revival of an ’80s property done right was Grimjack, which gave us a standalone “back to basic” story with that first IDW mini-series from a couple of years ago. Yeah, sure, as someone who was reading Grimjack during its original run, I would have liked to have seen stories that picked up from that point, but the continuity…the explanations required to set up just what’s going on with Grimjack, would almost certainly have been too much for anyone new to the series to bother with. With prices going up and money tight, you gotta keep that cost of entry low, and giving readers a continuity-lite story to reintroduce your long-dormant characters seems to be the way to go.
That’s a pretty roundabout way of saying I’m looking forward to more Grimjack, but there you go. I’m looking forward to more Nexus someday, too, but hopefully they’ll have better luck next time.
- Hellboy: Wild Hunt #5 and B.P.R.D.: 1947 #2 – Now, I love the Hellboy comics, but with the BPRD series essentially a monthly ongoing, I feel like the…”specialness,” I guess, of the properties is getting diminished somewhat. It almost feels like I’m getting too much Hellboy-universe stuff. That’s a terrible, terrible complaint to make, since it’s not as if I’m not enjoying BPRD, but…I can really use a break from it, I think.
- Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #4 – I enjoyed this series far more than I really expected. Yeah, I know, it included yet another entry in Marvel’s Obama-exploit-a-thon, but at least it was handled with some humor. And frankly, if you’ve got Frog Thor in your comic, you’ve pretty much got the wind at your back.
- Luke Cage Noir #1 – Okay, we’re just getting silly, now.
- Red Circle: Inferno #1 – I liked the Hangman one-shot last week, and while the last thing I need is more superhero comics in my life, I have enough of a nostalgic feeling for the Red Circle line to at least continue checking the books out.
However, “Red Circle nostalgia” isn’t the enormous sales influence one would expect, he said sarcastically, since we’ve barely moved any copies. Even pointing out that 1) hey, I liked it, and 2) that J. Michael Straczynski guy wrote it, you guys like him — nope, not a lot of interest yet. We’ll see if things hopefully improve.
- Sonic the Hedgehog #203 – Just noting that this is up to issue 203. And the kids at our shop still go crazy for it.
- Star Trek: Nero #1 – I was going to say “maybe a bit too late to take advantage of the movie,” but it’ll be in a trade by the time the new Trek film is on DVD, so there’s that. Okay, so DVD releases have never impacted related comic book sales ever, but one can always hope.
- Ultimate Comics Avengers #1 and Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #1 – Hopefully the bad taste left in people’s mouths by the Ultimatum series won’t negatively affect sales on these relaunches. But that magic “#1” does tend to counter many an ill feeling.
- Wednesday Comics #6 – I still do love this project, but 1) nicely illustrated boring Superman stories are still boring Superman stories, and 2) seriously, I can’t plow my way through that Wonder Woman strip anymore.
Still really enjoying everything else, though. Kyle Baker’s Hawkman is a delight, and oh Lordy, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez Metal Men – that’s some four-color ambrosia right there.
